Contentions

Yesterday was business as usual at the United Nations, with Iran and a host of other despotic regimes winning seats on leading human-rights bodies. What should by any estimation be considered an astonishing inversion of the principles that the institution purports to champion somehow seems barely remarkable coming from the UN. For decades it has rendered its human-rights bodies Orwellian caricatures by handing them into the charge of the world’s worst human-rights abusers. It is completely absurd to imagine that the bodies that are supposed to be responsible for policing human rights can be administered by the very countries that ought to be subject to investigation.

The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women can now look forward to the assistance of the Iranians in fulfilling its worthy mission of promoting the welfare of the world’s women. Similarly, Iran will no doubt be eager to make itself useful in its new position on the UN’s NGO Committee, which is tasked with determining which NGOs are to be accredited by the UN. For years now tyrannical leaders have been seeking to use such positions of influence to drive out those NGOs that dare to publicize and criticize their shameful human-rights records. Iran’s ascent to a seat at this table is just another victory for the world’s dictators, hell-bent not only on tormenting their own peoples but also on ensuring that these crimes are kept far away from the world’s attention.

As for Iran’s newly found place in a forum supposedly devoted to women’s rights, this move would surely be deemed laughable if it weren’t also so tragic. The lot of women in Iran is particularly appalling. The mullahs’ regime there enforces one of the most draconian versions of Islamic religious law. Iran’s laws regulate everything from how women are to dress to the myriad areas of their lives that are to be governed by their husband’s consent. And women in Iran have fallen victim in large numbers to Iran’s liberal use of the death penalty, executed unsparingly for crimes ranging from adultery to drug-related offenses.

Not surprisingly, the monitoring group UN Watch has been particularly scathing in its assessment of these events. Hillel Neuer, the organization’s director, responded by announcing, “Today is a black day for human rights. By empowering the perpetrators over the victims, the UN harms the cause of human rights, betrays its founding principles, and undermines its own credibility.” The United States has similarly expressed its opposition to seeing Iran assume membership of these committees, just as administration officials have been compelled to protest Iran’s choice of one of the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage takers for its new envoy to the UN. But given that move, and if the administration really finds the thought of Iran sitting on a human-rights body so deplorable, then why does the U.S. government continue to legitimate the regime in Iran by continuing to push the line that President Rouhani is a moderate with whom it is advisable to negotiate?

There is little point in American officials protesting this kind of thing as long as the UN continues to remain what it has long been: a club for the dictatorships that dominate its membership. Some protest the disproportionate power of the UN’s Security Council and the five permanent members that dominate that body. Yet the real travesty of the UN is that in the General Assembly and throughout its maze of committees and bodies, it gives a vote to regimes that don’t even allow their own people the most basic right to vote in free and fair elections.

Surely international law, and the human-rights norms these laws are supposed to protect, will remain a mockery so long as countries that have nothing but disregard for human rights and the rule of law continue to have equal say in halls of the international community. If the UN ever wanted to get serious about human rights, it would start by not letting the criminals assume the position of judge and jury.